Oh, he totally lost it after Zelda finally dumped him, yeah. He went on an epic bender when she returned his ring IIRC and went back home to St. Paul to his mother's house and holed up in the attic to rewrite what became TSOP!....very recursive, except I feel Amory never could have written anything. Fitzgerald killed him off in WWII in the first draft of the book, lol.)
(Because I am defensive of Zelda, she didn't marry him after it became a best-selling novel, how could she have? The book was published March 26 and they were married April 3. She responded to his renewed confidence and actually publishing a novel and doing something rather than pressing her to marry him because he didn't want to be rejected. When Fitzgerald rewrote the book he also added a great deal about Zelda in Rosalind, including phrases from her letters, which he would continue doing all his life. Wagner-Martin is flat out wrong, Zelda's family was well off for a small Southern town but definitely did not have a ton of servants. Zelda didn't do any housework because she was her mother's spoiled darling. She was not the archetypal Southern belle, if she had been, Scott wouldn't have married her. The stuff he wrote later about them not loving each other was decades later when they were both very bitter.)
(Tl;dr Team Zelda ever since my mother gave me her hardback copy of Mitford's biography when I was like ten)
Some favourite biographical tidbits I remember:
Fitzgerald was reprimanded for sitting down on the job while hammering at that railway job. He also didn't own a pair of overalls.
He wrote to Hemingway, "This Side of Paradise: A Romance and a Reading List. The Sun Also Rises: A Romance and a Guide Book."
His pal Shane Leslie who delivered the first draft to Max Perkins said something like, "It has literary value. When he is killed in the War of course it will have commercial value."
Scott didn't just use Zelda's words -- he inserted the whole letter from Sigourney Fay into his typescript, the actual page, different typeface signature and all. Shane Leslie noticed he did it and didn't call him out publicly on it, but said he shouldn't have done it. It wasn't exactly plagiarism -- Scott just seemed to have the idea that if he ran across good material, it was his, because he was a great writer. He used to ask people if they had interesting stories and paid them a flat fee if he thought they were usable in fiction.
He called TSOP "The Collected Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald" because it wove a lot of his earlier writing together -- poems, thoughts on books, short stories, even the short play about Rosalind. ("Mirroring Rosalind's materialistic relationship with Amory, Sayre initially ended her relationship with Fitzgerald due to his lack of financial prospects and his inability to support her accustomed lifestyle as an idle Southern belle." Damn who wrote this bullshit on Wiki anyway? It's really distorted and biased.)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2022-05-21 12:38 am (UTC)(Because I am defensive of Zelda, she didn't marry him after it became a best-selling novel, how could she have? The book was published March 26 and they were married April 3. She responded to his renewed confidence and actually publishing a novel and doing something rather than pressing her to marry him because he didn't want to be rejected. When Fitzgerald rewrote the book he also added a great deal about Zelda in Rosalind, including phrases from her letters, which he would continue doing all his life. Wagner-Martin is flat out wrong, Zelda's family was well off for a small Southern town but definitely did not have a ton of servants. Zelda didn't do any housework because she was her mother's spoiled darling. She was not the archetypal Southern belle, if she had been, Scott wouldn't have married her. The stuff he wrote later about them not loving each other was decades later when they were both very bitter.)
(Tl;dr Team Zelda ever since my mother gave me her hardback copy of Mitford's biography when I was like ten)
Some favourite biographical tidbits I remember:
Fitzgerald was reprimanded for sitting down on the job while hammering at that railway job. He also didn't own a pair of overalls.
He wrote to Hemingway, "This Side of Paradise: A Romance and a Reading List. The Sun Also Rises: A Romance and a Guide Book."
His pal Shane Leslie who delivered the first draft to Max Perkins said something like, "It has literary value. When he is killed in the War of course it will have commercial value."
Scott didn't just use Zelda's words -- he inserted the whole letter from Sigourney Fay into his typescript, the actual page, different typeface signature and all. Shane Leslie noticed he did it and didn't call him out publicly on it, but said he shouldn't have done it. It wasn't exactly plagiarism -- Scott just seemed to have the idea that if he ran across good material, it was his, because he was a great writer. He used to ask people if they had interesting stories and paid them a flat fee if he thought they were usable in fiction.
He called TSOP "The Collected Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald" because it wove a lot of his earlier writing together -- poems, thoughts on books, short stories, even the short play about Rosalind. ("Mirroring Rosalind's materialistic relationship with Amory, Sayre initially ended her relationship with Fitzgerald due to his lack of financial prospects and his inability to support her accustomed lifestyle as an idle Southern belle." Damn who wrote this bullshit on Wiki anyway? It's really distorted and biased.)